Communications of the ACM
The Management Team
Credit: SmartDigitals
Noteworthy software personality Joel Spolsky weighs in on how entrepreneurs should approach management, based on his first-hand observations within the startup world. Very few company founders start out with management experience, says Spolsky, so they tend to make it up as they go along. Sometimes they try to reinvent management from first principles, adopting a "command and control" approach to getting things done. The problem, unfortunately, is that this top-down management approach rarely works well with any organization larger than several people.
As Spolsky points out, 90% of startup founders use the "Command and Control" management approach at first, simply because they know of no other approach. However, this is dangerous because it's not going to scale. When the company grows from 3 to 30, top-down management doesn't work, because it doesn't take advantage of everyone's brains in the organization. It is de-motivating to work for a company where your job is just to take orders. Tech startups need to organize their workforce so that smart hires can use their brains 24/7. They need to stop thinking of the management team at the top of the organization and, instead, start thinking of the software developers, the designers, the product managers, and the front line sales people as the top of the organization.
In short, the "management team" isn't the "decision making" team. It's a support or administrative function. Administrators aren't supposed to make the hard decisions: all those super genius computer scientists that you had to recruit at great expense are supposed to make the hard decisions. That's why you're paying them. This mimics the arrangement of a university department, where the chairperson of the department might call meetings and adjudicate who teaches what class, but she certainly doesn't tell the other professors what research to do, or when to hold office hours, or what to write or think. That's the way it has to work in a knowledge organization.
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